Of Browning's full-length portraits of women in the dramas, the finest piece of work is the portrait of the happiest woman--the play-Duchess of Juliers, no longer Duchess, but ever Our lady of dear Ravestein.
Colombe is no incarnated idea but a complete human being, irreducible to a formula, whom we know the better because there is always in her more of exquisite womanhood to be discovered.

Even the too fortunate Valence--all readers of his own sex must pronounce him too fortunate--will for ever be finding her anew.
In the development of his dramatic style Browning more and more lost sight of the theatre and its requirements; his stage became more and more a stage of the mind.

_Strafford_, his first play, is the work of a novice, who has little of the instinct for theatrical effect, but who sets his brain to invent striking tableaux, to prepare surprises, to exhibit impressive attitudes, to calculate--not always successfully--the angle of a speech, so that it may with due impact reach the pit.

The opening scene expounds the situation.

In the second Wentworth and Pym confront each other; the King surprises them; Wentworth lets fall the hand of Pym, as the stage tradition requires; as Wentworth withdraws the Queen enters to unmake what he has made, and the scene closes with a tableau expressing the sentimental weakness of Charles: Come, dearest!--look, the little fairy, now That cannot reach my shoulder! Dearest, come! And so proceeds the tragedy, with much that ought to be dear to the average actor, which yet is somehow not always even theatrically happy.
The pathos of the closing scene where Strafford is discovered in The Tower, sitting with his children, is theatrical pathos of the most correct kind, and each little speech of little William and little Anne is uttered as much for the audience as for their father, implying in every word "See, how we, poor innocents, heighten the pity of it." The hastily written _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is, perhaps, of Browning's dramas the best fitted for theatrical representation.